A Nation Forged in War

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Jennifer Brooks, the author of a fine book on World War II veterans and Civil Rights, reviewed A Nation Forged in War in the April 2012 American Historical Review. The link to JSTOR, if you have access, is here.

The review begins:

In this study, Thomas Bruscino examines how white veterans embedded ethnic and religious pluralism brought home from World War II in the American Cold War consensus. Bruscino builds his thesis on a mix of sources, including letters, memoirs, government documents, and the GI Roundtable pamphlet series produced during the war by the American Historical Association. His well‐written, accessible narrative will interest both scholars of war and society and the general public.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Richard Meinhart, a professor at the U.S. Army War College, has reviewed the book for Parameters. From the conclusion:

The book’s strength is the effective manner in which it efficiently describes the social and political events, and the statistical data supporting the various vignettes, all designed to capture the reader analytically and emotionally.... Growing up as the child of a second-generation American and World War II veteran from a Catholic Hungarian neighborhood in a diverse ethnic and religious Pennsylvania city, this allowed the reviewer to connect with many of the author’s revelations. If this book is any indication of the quality of the Legacies of War series, look forward to the upcoming releases.

The webpage for the publication is here, the pdf with the book review is here.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Lawrence J. McCaffrey, emeritus professor at Loyola University of Chicago, has reviewed the book for a publication out of Boston College called the Irish Literary Supplement. The essay is called "Foxhole Buddies," and it is available at thefreelibrary.com, here, and Lexis-Nexis, here.

A sample:

Bruscino is obviously right when he contrasts the tolerance of servicemen and civilians, but the war also increased patriotism and cooperation on the home front. For example, women in defense factories developed friendly social and working in relations with people who didn't share their religious beliefs or ethnic loyalties. While there was a contrast between open-minded servicemen and the folks back home, in non-combat situations the former tended to hang out more with their own kind and those they considered strangers. In combat and other wartime risks everyone was your own kind whether on land, sea, or in the air.

A Nation Forged In War is an important and highly readable book; it is also a valuable contribution to ethnic and World War II historiographies. Bruscino makes good use of primary and secondary sources and writes excellent prose.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

A historian named Matthew A. Ides has reviewed the book in the Register of the Kentuck Historical Society. Readers with access to Project MUSE can read the full text here.

The review provides a mix of complements and critiques, and concludes warmly: "Scholars of twentieth-century American history, World War II, and American religion, race, and ethnicity will find A Nation Forged in War valuable for its insights on how World War II and its veterans changed American ethnic and religious relationships. Bruscino's work points to many potentially fruitful paths for future research on the national postwar development."

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

"Band of Brothers," Michael Barone's review of A Nation Forged in War, is now available at the Claremont Review of Books.

My favorite part is the conclusion:

Bruscino leads off his story by recalling the Four Chaplains—Methodist, Dutch Reform, Catholic, Jewish—who in February 1943, when their ship was torpedoed, handed off their life jackets to sailors and then locked arms in prayer as their ship plunged into the North Atlantic. It's impossible to read this without tearing up, and without reflecting, as Bruscino urges us to do, on how their example helped to make this a better country. A better country in many ways, but one that now is past, and the past is always, in L.P. Hartley's phrase, another country. We are the lucky inheritors, three generations later, of a country strengthened rather than weakened by an experience of total war, strengthened materially, geopolitically and, as Bruscino tells us, culturally. But our duty is to take our country in different directions from those in which the wartime experience took postwar America.

Friday, March 25, 2011

The very nice people over at New Books in Military History interviewed me about A Nation Forged in War. Here is what they had to say about the book:

Prior to 1945, the United States was still largely a collection of different ethnic and racial communities, living alongside each other in neighborhoods, villages, and towns. There was only a faint “American identity.” In his new book A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (University of Tennessee Press, 2010), Thomas Bruscino argues that the act of military service in the Second World War changed created such a unified identity. As individual men from thousands of small homogenous communities across America entered the military in wartime, they were compelled to work together, sleep together, train together, and if need be, fight together against a common foe. Over the course of the war these representatives of their own unique ethnic enclaves came together to create a new American identity – a mutually accepted unilateral form of whiteness transcending existing racial hierarchies that were a legacy of the nineteenth century. Yet while this new consensus went on after the war to promote a new sense of tolerance that created post-war prosperity and stability, sadly it also remained tied to the color line, as African-Americans and other non-whites learned as they sought equal access to the fruits of American democracy. Bruscino’s book is a valuable and insightful study of how tightly intertwined war, society, and identity are in the American experience.

In contrast to the German practice of forming military units from soldiers of the same city or region, the US melds together groups of men from diverse geographic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Bruscino (US Army School of Advanced Military Studies) finds this to be one of the more important legacies of WW II. The forced intimacy of training and warfare eroded many prejudicial barriers and, in the postwar world, served as the grassroots basis for a newly enlarged sense of tolerance. The sense of sharing a common identity first emerged among troops stationed in England and Ireland. Ethno-religious differences faded as men found greater unity in terms of social values they deemed distinctly "American." Once on the continent, these differences emerged with ever-greater clarity and consistency. Bruscino notes that the size of the WW II mobilization (around 15 million men and women) and the duration of the commitment (1941-1946) were decisive factors in shaping long-term outcomes. In combat, the key motivation remained mutual protection and defense, not ideology. Unit cohesion spelled survival without regard to any other factor, and out of this foxhole experience grew a greater sense of respect for cultural differences. A well-written, highly accessible account of emergent pluralism in US culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. -- J. Kleiman, University of Wisconsin Colleges

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

On Saturday, August 21, at 5:00AM Eastern time, an interview with me talking about A Nation Forged in War will air on the Pat Williams Show on WDBO 580AM, an Orlando radio station. If you happen to be up, you can listen at the link. I will let you know if the interview can be downloaded after it airs.

Here is some background on Pat Williams. He's the senior vice-president for the Orlando Magic. And, yes, I managed to relate the book to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Orlando Magic, but he-who-shall-not-be-named was not named.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Military history buffs are in for a real treat. Author and history professor Thomas Bruscino will be here discussing and signing A Nation Forged in War. This groundbreaking work outlines the social and cultural impact of the World War II years.

So imagine my delight at applying the Page 99 Test and finding a full page about vomit and toilet facilities. Among the lovely phrases found on my page 99 are "sick to our stomachs," "nauseating stench," "residue of caustic GI soap lather," "a not too peaceful crap," "vomit covered the floors and fixtures," and "cold sea-water douche." Well.

It could be worse—page 99 might have been one of those blank pages in between chapters. Then I would have had to ramble about the irony of the meaninglessness of war, since my book was an attempt to find a larger meaning in World War II. Instead, I got “a not too peaceful crap.” So let’s talk about what that means.

Description

World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and this new book—the first in the Legacies of War series—explores one of the most significant changes it fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious tolerance. A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War helped to dissolve long-standing differences among white soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds.

Never before or since have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time: more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to 1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers’ shared experiences—enduring basic training, living far from home, engaging in combat—transformed their views of other ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how specific military policies and practices worked to counteract old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder what it meant to be white in America.

Using the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias. Smith’s defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy’s victory some three decades later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar decades.

Extensively documented, A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.